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‘Nikki Haley Will Not Be the Next President’: Our Columnists Weigh In
With candidates entering the 2024 presidential race, Times columnists and Opinion writers are starting a scorecard assessing their strengths and weaknesses. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any actual caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of accepting the party’s nomination next summer. We begin with Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador in the Trump administration, who announced her bid for the Republican nomination on Tuesday.How seriously should we take Nikki Haley’s candidacy?David Brooks In a normal party, she would have to be taken seriously. She’s politically skilled, has never lost an election, has domestic and foreign policy experience, has been a popular governor, is about as conservative as the median G.O.P. voter and is running on an implicit platform: Let’s end the chaos and be populist but sensible. The question is, is the G.O.P. becoming once again a normal party?Jane Coaston To borrow a phrase, we should take it extremely literally but not seriously. She is indeed running for president. But Nikki Haley will not be the next president of the United States of America.Ross Douthat Much less seriously than the likely front-running candidacies of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, and somewhat less seriously than the likely also-ran candidacy of Mike Pence. Which means that barring a scenario where at least two of those three men don’t catch fire, not particularly seriously at all.David French The Republican race is best summed up as two individuals (Trump and DeSantis) and a field. Maybe a third candidate can emerge from the field, and maybe that person can be Haley — a decent reason to take her seriously — but we need to see evidence of independent traction.Michelle Goldberg Not very. I can’t imagine who she thinks her constituency is. A video teasing her candidacy starts with a spiel by the neocon Reagan official Jeane Kirkpatrick. Talk about nailing the zeitgeist!Rosie Gray Haley handled the Trump years more deftly than most. She never allowed herself to be dragged into anything too embarrassing or scandalous and didn’t fall victim to vicious Trump world back-stabbing. But she probably isn’t the kind of candidate who can get through a Republican presidential primary. Shrewd as she has been, she can’t plausibly reinvent herself as a 2023 outrage merchant.Liz Mair She could be the next vice president. That’s the reason to take her seriously.Mike Madrid I don’t see Haley as a serious candidate for the presidency or the vice presidency. She brings nothing demographically or ideologically to the G.O.P. that it doesn’t already have. But it is a serious attempt to maintain her relevance in the Republican hierarchy as a nonwhite woman willing to take a cabinet position or appointment to reassure primary voters that they aren’t actually a bunch of monolithic white people.Daniel McCarthy The interventionist foreign policy that Ambassador Haley has made her signature theme in recent years is unlikely to resonate in an America First party.Bret Stephens Seriously. Last month, Haley gave a speech to an association of auto dealers — the kind of audience any G.O.P. candidate needs to win over. Someone who was in attendance told me she got three thunderous standing ovations. It’s said of Ron DeSantis that the closer you get to him, the less you like him. Haley is the opposite. She still has work to do to win over other core Republican constituencies (above all, evangelicals and Trump sympathizers), but nobody should underestimate her appeal. She looks like a winner to a party that’s desperate to win.What matters most about her as a presidential candidate?Brooks If Trump and DeSantis compete in the Trumpy lane, there will be room for a normie candidate to oppose them. She’s more charismatic than Pence or Mike Pompeo, more conservative than Larry Hogan or Chris Sununu. Her problem is South Carolina. She’ll get no credit for winning that early primary, and it will be devastating to her campaign if she loses.Coaston Haley ought to be an interesting candidate — daughter of immigrants, former governor of a state experiencing big population shifts, a U.N. ambassador — but she seems to have no real basis to run for office. She’s not a populist, and she’s not a culture warrior.Douthat Her possible ability to split off a (small) piece of the non-Trump vote in early primaries, helping him to the nomination if those primaries are extremely close.French She’s a conventional Republican. If no one like her can gain traction, it will be a decisive signal that the Republican base has fundamentally transformed and traditional ideological conservatives are at best an imperfect fit for the G.O.P.Goldberg It will be interesting to see if Trump tries to destroy her right away as a warning to others, or holds off since he’s likely to fare best in a fractured field, with Haley pulling enough votes away from DeSantis to give the nomination to Trump. The more candidates there are, the more likely Trump is to win with a plurality.Gray Not so long ago, the Republican National Committee was predicting continued electoral doom unless the party expanded beyond its mostly white base. So Marco Rubio threw himself into the failed Gang of Eight immigration bill; Paul Ryan went on a listening tour of poor urban communities; and Haley had the Confederate flag removed from the State Capitol grounds. For a time, Trump seemed to upend any hope that these savvy rising stars had of one day reaching the White House. Haley’s candidacy will test that assumption, and that’s why she matters. Did Trump stamp out the ambitions of her generation for good, putting an end to the dream of a friendlier, more moderate Republican Party? Or did he merely put those ambitions on hold?Madrid Over 70 percent of Republican primary voters are white, so her candidacy will test the viability of a nonwhite candidate.Mair She has foreign policy and national security experience, which DeSantis does not. Trump can claim to have that kind of experience, but for many people, all it amounts to is keeping classified documents he shouldn’t have had, coddling up to dictators and autocrats, being softer on China than a lot of Republicans would like and other national security failures. Less substantively, she’s a woman of color, and Republican primary voters would love a chance to show that there are indeed nonwhite people and women who think just like they do (this is something a lot of primary voters are a bit neurotic about, and Haley knows it).McCarthy She’s the running mate they wish John McCain had in 2008, the kind of Republican the party thought it needed to appeal to a less white, more educated and firmly feminist America. But Trump changed the dream of the G.O.P.’s destiny: appealing to the working class, rather than to a wider ethnic profile within the class of educated professionals, is what Republicans voters now expect. Haley is too representative of the party elite’s desires to be seen as a plausible tribune of the working class.Stephens If the subtext of a DeSantis candidacy is that he is Trump shorn of the former president’s personal flaws, the subtext of Haley’s is that she is the Republican Party shorn of the former president. A woman, a minority, an immigrant background, a self-made person: Without having to say a word, she embodies everything Trump’s vision of America isn’t. She also would be less vulnerable to Democratic attack lines about Republican bigotry.What do you find most inspiring — or unsettling — about her vision for America?Brooks Her immigrant story is a good one, her decision to get rid of the Confederate flag showed common decency. On the other hand, there was an awful lot of complicity and silence when she served under Trump.Coaston I would ask … what vision for America? What exactly is Haley offering that is distinctly different from the Generic Republican that Donald Trump (whom she reportedly asked first before deciding to announce her candidacy) became? She is selling the idea that she is somehow both distinct enough to separate herself from the former president she continues to support and similar enough to win the nomination with this Republican Party. I don’t buy it.Douthat She has generally offered herself as the candidate of Reaganite bromides and as a potential vehicle for members of the Republican gentry who wish the Trump era had never happened but don’t particularly want to have any unpleasant fights about it. That’s a vision that’s neither inspiring nor unsettling; it’s just dull and useless and unlikely to take her anywhere.French Haley is right about the most important issues facing the free world. The United States should aggressively support Ukraine, and it should aggressively compete with China and deter Chinese aggression. What’s unsettling about her is that, like many Republicans, she never seemed to figure out quite how to handle Trump and constantly flipped and flopped between confrontation and accommodation. Yet her vacillation may be the key to her potential viability. Her back-and-forth on Trump mirrors the back-and-forth of many rank-and-file Republicans. They could perhaps see themselves in her.Goldberg She’s such a hollow figure that it’s impossible to say what her vision is. “What I’ve heard again and again is that Haley’s raw skills obscure an absence of core beliefs and a lack of tactical thinking,” Tim Alberta wrote in a great profile of her in 2021. She’d most likely pursue a hawkish foreign policy, though, so she could be the candidate of those nostalgic for the George W. Bush administration.Gray Haley might be the last person in American politics still quoting Sheryl Sandberg. “We are leaning in,” Haley told Sean Hannity last month. “It is time for a new generation. It is time for more leadership.” But at 51, she’s part of a political generation that can hardly be considered “new.” Her candidacy feels trapped in the post-Tea Party, mid-Obama administration era when she rose to prominence.Madrid Haley will be the first of many candidates trying to connect with Trump’s populist base while also resurrecting the establishment infrastructure that capitulated to him. If she can explain that she was against him before she was for him and now is against him again in a way that wins over voters and reassures party leaders, it may be inspiring for the sliver of Republicans who still maintain the party can return to the Reagan-Bush days, and unsettling for everyone else.Mair It’s not clear to me what her vision is for America. She has alternated between praising and defending Trump and Trumpism and critiquing him and it.McCarthy What’s unsettling is that her vision is a prepackaged failure. She was a moderately conservative governor and something of a soft libertarian at a time when an aggressive neoconservatism was dominant in the G.O.P. But when she took to the national stage she proved unable to distinguish between the tough realism of Jeane Kirkpatrick and the tough-sounding but inept idealism of the George W. Bush administration. She imbibed Robert Kagan when she should have studied George Kennan.Stephens There are two dueling G.O.P. visions for America: the “Fortress America” vision, of a nation besieged by undesirable immigrants and undermined by undesirable globalists, and a “City on a Hill” vision, of a nation whose powers of attraction are its greatest strength. Haley strikes me as leaning much closer to the second vision, at least within the broader parameters of conservative thinking.Imagine you’re a G.O.P. operative or campaign manager. What’s your elevator pitch for a Haley candidacy?Brooks Every wing of the party would accept her, at least as its second choice, if the top choice falters. It’s not an inspiring strategy, but it has worked for others — not the least of which a certain A. Lincoln.Coaston Remember when Republicans seemed hinged? Nikki Haley remembers.Douthat A charismatic female candidate with a vague platform and banal record is all we need to take a time machine back to the politics of 1988.Goldberg She’s canny, poised and doesn’t come off as crazy, so could be formidable in the general election.French She can beat Joe Biden!Gray Haley has already been out there making her own elevator pitch for her candidacy: “We have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president,” she told Sean Hannity last month. “It is time that we get a Republican in there that can lead and that can win a general election.”Madrid Nikki Haley has the establishment experience to beat the establishment.Mair No one should underestimate the appeal of a nonwhite, female conservative candidate to old, conservative, white, die-hard G.O.P. primary voters, and she’s not another white conservative dude.McCarthy Did you ever wish Hillary Clinton was a Republican? Now she is!Stephens If she can win the nomination, she will win the general election.On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rank Nikki Haley’s potential as a presidential candidate? Share your ranking — and your reasoning for it — in the comments. (1 means she will drop out early; 10 means she has a strong chance of accepting the nomination.)David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David French, Michelle Goldberg and Bret Stephens are Times columnists.Jane Coaston is a Times Opinion writer.Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) has covered the conservative movement for more than a decade as a political reporter for BuzzFeed News and The Atlantic.Mike Madrid is a Republican political consultant and a co-founder of the Lincoln Project.Liz Mair (@LizMair) has served as a campaign strategist for Scott Walker, Roy Blunt, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Rick Perry. She is the founder and president of Mair Strategies.Daniel McCarthy is the editor of “Modern Age: A Conservative Review.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
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Republicans Try to Challenge Trump in 2024, but Barely Say His Name
The former president’s Republican rivals appear highly reluctant to criticize him, and Nikki Haley didn’t even mention him as she jumped into the race this week.Nikki Haley’s leap into the 2024 presidential campaign this week included a nod to the historic nature of her candidacy, as a woman of color and the child of immigrants making a White House run as a Republican.But beyond biography, the former South Carolina governor’s entry to the race on Tuesday underscored how difficult it will be for many Republican candidates to persuade the party’s base that they should bear the standard for the G.O.P., not former President Donald J. Trump, who maintains the loyalties of so many voters.Ms. Haley’s announcement, which she will repeat on Wednesday at an event in Charleston, S.C., seemed like a calculated appeal to Republican voters who are ready to turn the page from the Trump era without burning the book of Mr. Trump’s presidency. She reminded voters that the Republican Party had lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections and said it was “time for a new generation of leadership,” both signs that she will call for a fresh start in the 2024 Republican primaries.But she never mentioned Mr. Trump by name, much less leveled any direct criticism at the only other major candidate in the presidential race.Ms. Haley’s conundrum about how to approach Mr. Trump will surely apply to other potential competitors. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who shares Mr. Trump’s pugnacious instincts and is the only Republican within striking distance in early polls of the field, has nevertheless been reluctant to trade insult for insult with the former president. Like Ms. Haley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Vice President Mike Pence served in the Trump administration. Overt critics of Mr. Trump, like Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Larry Hogan of Maryland, both former governors, risk not being taken seriously by Republican voters.Ms. Haley has “a pretty bad tightrope to walk,” said Chip Felkel, a longtime Republican consultant in South Carolina and a critic of Donald J. Trump.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressMs. Haley has time to devise a strategy for challenging Mr. Trump, but moving on from the last Republican presidency will be tricky, said Chip Felkel, a longtime Republican consultant in South Carolina and a critic of Mr. Trump. Since leaving his administration in 2018 and making halting efforts to criticize him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Ms. Haley has tacked back into his orbit.The Run-Up to the 2024 ElectionThe jockeying for the next presidential race is already underway.G.O.P. Field: Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador, has officially entered the 2024 race. It’s the first major Republican challenge to Donald J. Trump, but unlikely to be the last.DeSantis’s Challenge: Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has pursued a strategy of conflict avoidance with Mr. Trump in the shadow G.O.P. primary. But if he runs for president as expected, a clash is inevitable.What the Polling Says: Mr. DeSantis is no Scott Walker, writes Nate Cohn. The Florida governor’s support among Republicans at this early stage of the primary cycle puts him in rare company.Harris’s Struggles: With President Biden appearing all but certain to run again, concerns are growing over whether Kamala Harris, who is trying to define her vice presidency, will be a liability for the ticket.“She’s got a pretty bad tightrope to walk,” Mr. Felkel said.In fact, her arrival in the Republican primary — and the expected entry of another South Carolinian, Senator Tim Scott, as well as of Mr. Hutchinson, who is leaning hard on his degree from the state’s evangelical conservative Bob Jones University — could make it easier for Mr. Trump to win the state, by dividing Republican voters who want to move past him.“They are fighting over non-Trump conservatives who’d like to see the party win elections and who are tired of the chaos,” Mr. Felkel said. “I’m not sure in South Carolina that’s a majority.”Difficulties lie ahead for candidates who choose not to take on Mr. Trump directly — particularly those, like Ms. Haley, who appear inclined to avoid saying his name — in hopes that they can create distance from him without going too far in the eyes of Republican voters. And if Mr. DeSantis can consolidate a bloc of voters, it remains to be seen whether the other rivals can make an affirmative case for their own candidacies beyond hoping Mr. DeSantis struggles.Even Ms. Haley’s résumé seemed like a credential to tread on lightly. In her announcement on Tuesday, she pointed to her experiences in the governor’s mansion in Columbia, S.C., and to her time as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. But she was light on listing accomplishments to burnish a claim to the highest elective office in the land.Her most notable achievement as governor, the delicate compromise that removed the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House, went unmentioned altogether, though the tragedy that instigated it — a massacre of Black parishioners at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church by a white supremacist — was invoked as a call to return the nation to religion.“We turned away from fear toward God and the values that still make our country the freest and greatest in the world,” she said. “We must turn in that direction again.”Still, Ms. Haley’s biggest advantage will be her deep connections in the state, the third to vote in the primary season next year. Retail politics and local organization matter in South Carolina, and regardless of the results in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, its results have a track record. Victory in the state propelled Joseph R. Biden Jr. to the Democratic nomination in 2020 and vaulted George W. Bush ahead of John McCain in the 2000 election.Chad Connelly, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, said that Ms. Haley remained “wildly popular” in the state, but that so did Mr. Trump, Mr. Scott and Mr. DeSantis — an unpredictable situation that he said he had not seen in his 25 years in South Carolina Republican politics. But Mr. Trump has never paid attention to organization, and Mr. DeSantis has little connection to the state.“People expect retail politics here,” Mr. Connelly said. “People expect you to meet them at Bill and Fran’s in Newberry for waffles.”Ms. Haley campaigning for Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina last year. Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesFor now, Mr. Trump has refrained from taunting, mocking or attacking Ms. Haley. Republican officials in South Carolina said that could be a sign that he is listening to consultants who are pleading with him not to assail a Republican woman of color, or that he is simply not viewing her as a serious threat.It could also mean that both candidates are sizing each other up as running mates, Mr. Felkel said. In 2016, Mr. Pence, then Indiana’s governor, helped shore up Mr. Trump’s appeal with conservative evangelical Christians, who had been leery of him. In 2024, with many of those voters still loyal to Mr. Trump, Ms. Haley might help Mr. Trump with perhaps his biggest weakness, suburban Republican women.Ms. Haley’s announcement video leaned heavily into her roots as the child of Indian immigrants, “not Black, not white, but different.” But she also emphasized that she had been taught to accentuate what Americans have in common, not what separates them, a reassuring message for the white voters who dominate the Republican Party.And she took pointed swipes at movements that emphasize the country’s racist past, including The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which traced Black American history to the first year enslaved Africans reached North American shores.In doing so, she signaled that her family’s immigrant roots would not impede her entry to the social policy and culture wars that have been central to the appeal of Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis.But vying for vice president would be difficult for Ms. Haley, South Carolina Republicans said, because the state’s primary comes so early. She will have to signal that she is in it to win it, Mr. Felkel said, and that might mean she will eventually have to go on the attack against her former boss.An adviser to Mr. Scott, who insisted on anonymity to discuss preliminary campaign preparations, said that because Ms. Haley worked for Mr. Trump, she would have a harder time separating herself from him. While Mr. Scott can fly above the fray, the adviser said, Ms. Haley will be under more pressure to confront the former president head-on.“It’s going to be one of the most fascinating things to watch that I’ve ever seen in politics,” Mr. Connelly said.Like Mr. Scott, Ms. Haley is projecting a more optimistic message than Mr. Trump’s often apocalyptic description of the United States. But whether that will be enough remains to be seen.“The challenge for this field is to tell the truth,” said Chris Christie, a Republican former governor of New Jersey and a potential candidate for president who has been vocally critical of Mr. Trump since breaking with him at the end of his presidency. “And it’s to tell the truth about everything — to tell the truth about your plans for the country, and to tell the truth about what has happened over the last number of years with Donald Trump and Joe Biden.”If people are “unwilling to tell all of it,” he said, “it’s unlikely you’ll have credibility on any of it.” More
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What to Know About Nikki Haley
Ms. Haley, for now the only well-known Republican to challenge Donald Trump for president, made history as South Carolina governor, and was a face of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy as his U.N. ambassador.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador who entered the presidential race on Tuesday, has long been seen as a rising Republican star: someone who broke the party’s white, male mold and could walk fine political lines, rejecting some right-wing extremes without alienating too many base voters.That image is about to be put to the test.Here are five things to know about Ms. Haley, 51, including pieces of her political history that are likely to be raised — by her or her opponents — in the coming campaign.Gender and ethnic firstsFrom the moment she was elected governor in 2010, Ms. Haley drew attention as a woman in a party dominated by men, a daughter of Indian immigrants in a party dominated by white people and a member of Generation X in a party dominated by boomers and the Silent Generation.She was the first woman and first person of color to lead South Carolina — not to mention, at 38, the youngest governor of any state at the time — and went on to become the first Indian American in a presidential cabinet.She spoke openly about how her gender and ethnicity had shaped her.A notable moment came in 2015, when she explained her decision to call for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol after a massacre by a white supremacist at an African American church in Charleston.She recalled how she had felt as a child when her father was racially profiled: Two police officers showed up at a produce stand and watched him until he paid.“That produce stand is still there, and every time I drive by it, I still feel that pain,” she said. “I realized that that Confederate flag was the same pain that so many people were feeling.”The Run-Up to the 2024 ElectionThe jockeying for the next presidential race is already underway.G.O.P. Field: Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador, has officially entered the 2024 race. It’s the first major Republican challenge to Donald J. Trump, but unlikely to be the last.DeSantis’s Challenge: Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has pursued a strategy of conflict avoidance with Mr. Trump in the shadow G.O.P. primary. But if he runs for president as expected, a clash is inevitable.What the Polling Says: Mr. DeSantis is no Scott Walker, writes Nate Cohn. The Florida governor’s support among Republicans at this early stage of the primary cycle puts him in rare company.Harris’s Struggles: With President Biden appearing all but certain to run again, concerns are growing over whether Kamala Harris, who is trying to define her vice presidency, will be a liability for the ticket.At the same time, she has used her platform and identity to argue that the United States is not systemically racist.“That is a lie. America is not a racist country,” she said at the Republican National Convention in 2020. “This is personal for me. I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. They came to America and settled in a small Southern town. My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari. I was a brown girl in a black and white world. We faced discrimination and hardship. But my parents never gave in to grievance and hate.”The governorshipMs. Haley, who began her political career as a state representative, was initially elected governor by what was a narrow margin for a state as staunchly Republican as South Carolina: 51 percent to 47 percent for her Democratic opponent. She more than tripled that margin when she was re-elected in 2014.In her first year in office, Ms. Haley signed a bill cracking down on illegal immigration, including by establishing a new law enforcement unit and requiring police officers to check the immigration status of people they stopped or arrested if they suspected they might be in the country illegally.In 2014, she signed a bill that redistributed education funding to districts with the highest poverty levels and provided money for reading coaches in schools.Ms. Haley also made South Carolina the second state to drop the Common Core education standards because, she said, “We don’t ever want to educate South Carolina children like they educate California children.”Ms. Haley called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House in 2015, after a white supremacist murdered nine parishioners at a Black church in Charleston. Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockThe Confederate flagIn 2015, three weeks after a white man killed nine Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Ms. Haley signed a bill to remove the Confederate battle flag — the military emblem of the South’s fight to preserve slavery — from the South Carolina House.The flag was lowered the next day, and Ms. Haley’s national profile soared.Ms. Haley first called for the flag’s removal five days after the church massacre. “We are not going to allow this symbol to divide us any longer,” she said. “The fact that people are choosing to use it as a sign of hate is something we cannot stand. The fact that it causes pain to so many is enough to move it from the Capitol grounds. It is, after all, a Capitol that belongs to all of us.”In the same speech, she took pains to say that, to many South Carolinians, the flag was “a symbol of respect, integrity and duty” and “a way to honor ancestors who came to the service of their state” — and that there was no need for the state to decide who was right: the people who saw it that way or those who saw it as “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past.”When she said the same thing in 2019, there was a much fiercer backlash to her assertion that the flag was not inherently racist, a sign of a political and social shift that she denounced in an opinion essay.The U.N. ambassadorshipAfter President Donald J. Trump chose her as his ambassador to the United Nations, Ms. Haley was confirmed overwhelmingly by the Senate, 96 to 4. She would serve in that role for about two years before resigning at the end of 2018.At the United Nations, Ms. Haley was a face of the Trump administration’s policies on Israel, North Korea, Russia and Syria.She accused the U.N. of “bullying” Israel for its treatment of Palestinians and called for the United States to move its Israeli Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. She supported sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear program and pushed hard for the decertification of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.But she was not always aligned with the president she served under.In one tense episode, Ms. Haley announced that the Trump administration would impose sanctions on Russia over its support for a Syrian government that was using chemical weapons against civilians — only for the White House to announce that it would not do so after all, suggesting that Ms. Haley had been confused about the policy.“I don’t get confused,” she responded tersely.Despite the internal conflicts, Ms. Haley maintained a high public approval rating throughout her time as ambassador, as she had during her governorship. In April 2018, when Mr. Trump’s approval rating was in the high 30s and low 40s, Ms. Haley’s was over 60 percent. (Such strength over Mr. Trump is not apparent in early polls of the 2024 race.)Learning to love TrumpMs. Haley denounced Mr. Trump during the 2016 Republican primary race, describing him as “everything I taught my children not to do in kindergarten.” (She endorsed Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.) She criticized Mr. Trump for his immigration policies and, particularly forcefully, for choosing “not to disavow the K.K.K.”Then Mr. Trump was elected, and, like many other Republicans who had opposed him, Ms. Haley changed her tune.She agreed to serve in his administration while staying restrained in her comments — not praising Mr. Trump, per se, but saying that his election showed he had connected with American voters and that Republicans needed to adapt accordingly. Over time, she became more enthusiastic.And while she condemned Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his incitement of the mob that attacked the Capitol — saying, “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history” — she quickly pivoted to cast him as a victim once the House filed impeachment charges.“They beat him up before he got into office, and they’re beating him up after he leaves office,” she said. “I mean, at some point, give the man a break.”In April 2021, she said she would not run for president in 2024 if Mr. Trump did.Sometime between then and now, she changed her mind. More
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Nikki Haley Announces 2024 Republican Presidential Bid, Challenging Trump
Ms. Haley, 51, a former South Carolina governor and a United Nations ambassador in the Trump administration, called for “generational change” in the party.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, entered the race for president on Tuesday, a well-hinted-at move that is likely to leave her as the lone major Republican challenger to former President Donald J. Trump for many weeks, if not months, as other potential 2024 rivals bide their time.By announcing her campaign early, Ms. Haley, 51, who called for “generational change” in her party, seized an opportunity for a head start on fund-raising and to command a closer look from Republican primary voters, whose support she needs if she is to rise from low single digits in early polls of the G.O.P. field.She made the announcement in a video that does not mention Mr. Trump’s name, but makes clear her intention to break with the Trump era. In addition to calling for a new generation to step up, she urged Republicans to rally around substantive issues and a candidate with appeal to mainstream America.“Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections,” she said. “That has to change.”Ms. Haley’s campaign has drawn encouragement from many polls showing that in a hypothetical multicandidate field, Mr. Trump wins less than 50 percent of Republican voters. Her entry into the race underscores how the former president has failed to scare off rivals in his third presidential campaign, announced in November after a disappointing midterm election for Republicans.Her announcement reversed a statement in 2021 that she would not run if Mr. Trump were a candidate. She was a rare figure to leave the Trump administration while earning praise from Mr. Trump rather than a parting insult. Mr. Trump recently said that when Ms. Haley informed him she was considering a run, he told her, “You should do it.’’That the former president has so far not coined an insulting nickname or otherwise attacked Ms. Haley is a sign, perhaps, that he does not perceive her as a major threat.Since leaving the Trump administration in 2018, Ms. Haley has walked a fine line with the former president, praising his policies and accomplishments in office while offering criticism that appeals to Republican moderates. The day after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, she said his actions “will be judged harshly by history.”But she opposed his impeachment for his actions surrounding the riot. “At some point, I mean, give the man a break,” she said on Fox News in late January 2021.In interviews last month, Ms. Haley swiped at the advanced age of both Mr. Trump, 76, and President Biden, 80. “I don’t think you need to be 80 years old to go be a leader in D.C.,” she told Fox News.The Run-Up to the 2024 ElectionThe jockeying for the next presidential race is already underway.G.O.P. Field: For months, Donald J. Trump has been the lone Republican to formally enter the 2024 presidential contest, but that is about to end. Here is a look at who is eyeing a run.DeSantis’s Challenge: Gov. Ron DeSantis has pursued a strategy of conflict avoidance with Mr. Trump in the shadow G.O.P. primary. But now he faces the pressing question of how long this approach can work.Education Issues: Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis are seizing on race and gender issues in schools, but such messages had a mixed record in the midterms.Harris’s Struggles: With President Biden appearing all but certain to run again, concerns are growing over whether Kamala Harris, who is trying to define her vice presidency, will be a liability for the ticket.To advance into the top tier of Republican presidential hopefuls, Ms. Haley’s campaign is banking on her skills as a retail campaigner in early nominating states. She is traveling to New Hampshire after a rally planned in South Carolina on Wednesday, for two town hall-style events, and she plans to be in Iowa next week.Ms. Haley was largely a bystander as cultural battles enveloped Republican primary races in 2022 and as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s leading potential rival, has increasingly leaned into such issues to stoke support from the G.O.P. base.But now she is jumping into the cultural fray, using her 3-minute 33-second announcement video to criticize those who say “our founding principles are bad” — text that was laid over images of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and the “1619 Project,” an interpretation of U.S. history, created by The New York Times, that focuses on the consequences of slavery.Ms. Haley, who is best known on the national stage for pursuing Mr. Trump’s foreign policy agenda for two years at the United Nations, is seeking to broaden her following through such cultural appeals, denouncing Democrats as pushing “socialism” in government and “wokeism” in schools. At the same time, she highlights her biography as the daughter of immigrants who rose to be South Carolina’s first female governor, and first nonwhite governor, as a rebuke of liberal arguments that America harbors systemic racism.“I was the proud daughter of Indian immigrants, not Black, not white,” Ms. Haley, who was born in Bamberg, S.C., says in the announcement video..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Ms. Haley’s father, Ajit Singh Randhawa, and her mother, Raj Kaur Randhawa, are immigrants from the Punjab region of India, who moved to South Carolina when her father accepted a teaching job at a historically Black college. Raised in the Sikh faith, Ms. Haley converted to Christianity after she married Michael Haley in 1996.After graduating from Clemson University, Ms. Haley worked for her family’s dress boutique, including as bookkeeper, before winning the first of three terms in the South Carolina House of Representatives.She was first elected governor in 2010, originally entering the Republican primary as an underdog but with the support of the departing incumbent, Mark Sanford. She was trailing in primary polls when an endorsement from Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, helped lift her to the nomination.In her second term, after a mass shooting in 2015 at an African American church in Charleston by a white supremacist, Ms. Haley called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the State Capitol.As a former South Carolina governor, Ms. Haley is theoretically well positioned for the state’s 2024 primary, the third nominating contest and the one that has historically culled the Republican field.But things could be complicated in her home state, whose conservative Republican voters fully embraced Mr. Trump in 2016. There is also the potential competition from another home state candidate, Senator Tim Scott, who is thought to be exploring a presidential run and has proved to be a formidable fund-raiser.Curtis Loftis, the South Carolina treasurer and a Trump backer, said there was little chance the former president would lose the 2024 primary there. “I’m not aware of many Republicans that would be Haley supporters over Trump supporters,” he said. “You have a lot of people who are independents. They’ll be with Nikki as opposed to President Trump.”But Wes Climer, a state senator and Haley supporter, said she could “absolutely” win the South Carolina primary if she did well in Iowa and New Hampshire. “She’s an outstanding retail candidate, and the presidential race tends to reward those skills,” he said.Other Republicans exploring presidential campaigns include Mr. DeSantis; former Vice President Mike Pence; and Mike Pompeo, a former secretary of state and C.I.A. director under Mr. Trump. Governors Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia are also thought to be eyeing a run, along with former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland.In early polls, which are partly a reflection of name recognition, Ms. Haley has been in the low single digits. She was the choice of 1 percent of Republican voters in a Monmouth University poll this month that showed Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis tied at 33 percent, with all other potential rivals at 2 percent or less. One out of four Republicans was undecided.Ms. Haley has long been a favorite of Republican donors. A political action committee she created in 2021 to build a donor list, support midterm candidates and pay for her political travel, Stand for America PAC, has raised $17 million.By comparison, Mr. DeSantis had about $64 million left from his record-shattering fund-raising for his re-election campaign last year; that money can potentially be rolled into a federal race. Mr. Pence, since leaving the White House, has raised $1.2 million through a political action committee (which spent $91,000 on copies of his recent memoir).The executive director of Ms. Haley’s PAC, Betsy Ankney, a former political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, will manage Ms. Haley’s campaign, which is based in Charleston, S.C. Others on Ms. Haley’s political team include Jon Lerner, her pollster and a senior consultant, and Chaney Denton, her longtime spokeswoman.A second political group Ms. Haley created, a nonprofit with a similar name to her PAC that is not required to publicly disclose supporters, took in contributions of $250,000 and more from major donors in 2019, according to information disclosed to Politico. The donors included the casino mogul Sheldon G. Adelson (before his death in 2021), the hedge fund manager Paul Singer and the investor Stanley Druckenmiller and his wife, Fiona Druckenmiller.During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, in which Ms. Haley first backed Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, she got into a high-profile spat with Mr. Trump after calling for him to release his tax returns. Mr. Trump, on Twitter, called her an embarrassment to South Carolina. “Bless your heart,” Ms. Haley tweeted back at him.But Ms. Haley went on to endorse Mr. Trump when he became the nominee, and he named her as his United Nations ambassador in 2017. She vowed to take on foreign adversaries in her announcement video, describing China and Russia as “on the march.”“They all think we can be bullied, kicked around,” Ms. Haley says in the video. “You should know this about me: I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”The first Indian American to hold a cabinet-level post, she earned respect from colleagues from other nations, even those who disagreed with the Trump administration’s foreign policy. Speaking at the United Nations in September 2018, Mr. Trump was laughed at when he boasted of his administration’s achievements.Ms. Haley’s departure later that year was viewed as her taking the next step toward a long-anticipated presidential run. More
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Nikki Haley Threw It All Away
I remember the first time I saw Nikki Haley. It was in a high school gym before the 2012 South Carolina Republican presidential primary. Tim Scott, who was then a congressman, was holding a raucous town hall, and Ms. Haley was there to cheer him on. The first woman governor of South Carolina, the first Indian American ever elected to statewide office there, the youngest governor in the country. Whatever that “thing” is that talented politicians possess, Ms. Haley had it. People liked her, and more important, she seemed to like people. She talked with you, not to you, and made routine conversations feel special and important. She seemed to have unlimited potential.Then she threw it all away.No political figure better illustrates the tragic collapse of the modern Republican Party than Nikki Haley. There was a time not very long ago when she was everything the party thought it needed to win. She was a woman when the party needed more women, a daughter of immigrants when the party needed more immigrants, a young changemaker when the party needed younger voters, and a symbol of tolerance who took down the Confederate flag when the party needed more people of color and educated suburbanites.When Donald Trump ran in the 2016 Republican primary, Ms. Haley stood next to Senator Marco Rubio, the candidate she had endorsed, and eviscerated Mr. Trump as a racist the party must reject: “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the K.K.K. That is not a part of our party. That is not who we want as president.” She was courageous, fighting on principle, a warrior who would never back down. Until she did.The politician who saw herself as a role model for women and immigrants transformed herself into everything she claimed to oppose: By 2021, Ms. Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA with comments like, “Thank goodness for Donald Trump or we never would have gotten Kamala Harris to the border.” In one sentence, she managed to attack women and immigrants while praising the man she had vowed never to stop fighting. She had gone from saying “I have to tell you, Donald Trump is everything I taught my children not to do in kindergarten” to “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.”As a former Republican political operative who worked in South Carolina presidential primaries, I look at Ms. Haley now, as she prepares to launch her own presidential campaign, with sadness tinged with regret for what could have been. But I’m not a bit surprised. Her rise and fall only highlights what many of us already knew: that Mr. Trump didn’t change the Republican Party, he revealed it. Ms. Haley, for all her talents, embodies the moral failure of the party in its drive to win at any cost, a drive so ruthless and insistent that it has transformed the G.O.P. into an autocratic movement. It’s not that she has changed positions to suit the political moment or even that she has abandoned beliefs she once claimed to be deeply held. It’s that the 2023 version of Ms. Haley is actively working against the core values that the 2016 Ms. Haley would have held to be the very foundation of her public life.By the time Ms. Haley resigned as ambassador to the United Nations, she had undergone a remarkable transformation.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesAs governor, her defining action was signing legislation removing the Confederate flag from the State Capitol. This came after the horrific massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, and after social media photos surfaced of the murderer holding Confederate flags. Ms. Haley compared the pain South Carolina Black people felt to the pain she had experienced when, as a young girl named Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, she had seen her immigrant father racially profiled as a potential thief at a store in Columbia. “I remember how bad that felt,” Ms. Haley told CNN in 2015. “That produce stand is still there, and every time I drive by it, I still feel that pain. I realized that that Confederate Flag was the same pain that so many people were feeling.”Then came Donald “you had some very fine people on both sides” Trump, and by 2019 Ms. Haley was defending the Confederate flag. In an interview that December, Ms. Haley told the conservative radio host Glenn Beck that the Charleston church shooter had “hijacked” the Confederate flag and that “people saw it as service, sacrifice and heritage.”In her 2019 book, “With All Due Respect,” the sort of autobiography candidates feel obligated to produce before launching a presidential campaign, Ms. Haley mentions Mr. Trump 163 times, overwhelmingly complimentary. In one lengthy passage, she insists that she was not referencing him in her 2016 Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech, when she called on Americans to resist “the siren call of the angriest voices.” It is always sad to see politicians lack the courage to say what should be said, but sadder still to see them speak up and later argue any courageous intent was misinterpreted.It didn’t have to be this way. No one forced Ms. Haley to accept Mr. Trump after he bragged about assaulting women in the “Access Hollywood” tape. No one forced her to defend the Confederate flag. No one forced her to assert Mr. Trump had “lost any sort of political viability” not long after the Capitol riot, then reverse herself, saying she “would not run if President Trump ran,” then prepare to challenge Mr. Trump in the primary. There is nothing new or novel about an ambitious politician engaging in transactional politics, but that’s a rare trifecta of flip-flop-flip.Mr. Trump has a pattern of breaking opponents who challenge him in a primary. Ms. Haley enters the race already broken. Had she remained the Nikki Haley who warned her party about Mr. Trump in 2016, she would have been perfectly positioned to run in 2024 as its savior. But as Ms. Haley knows all too well, Republicans aren’t looking to be saved. The latest Morning Consult poll shows Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida together drawing 79 percent of Republican primary voters. Ms. Haley is at 3 percent, one percentage point more than Liz Cheney.The female star of the current Republican Party isn’t the daughter of immigrants taking down the Confederate flag. It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sells “Proud Christian Nationalist” T-shirts while becoming arguably the second-most powerful member of the House in little more than one two-year term. If Mr. Trump wins the Republican nomination (and I think he will), he may well choose the election-denying loser Kari Lake as his running mate, not the woman who twice won governor’s races the old-fashioned way: with the most votes once the ballots were counted.There is a great future behind Nikki Haley. She will never be the voice of truth she briefly was in 2016, and she will never be MAGA enough to satisfy the base of her party. But no one should feel sorry for Ms. Haley. It was her choice.Stuart Stevens (@stuartpstevens) is a former Republican political consultant who has worked on many campaigns for federal and state office, including the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
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Which Republicans Are Eyeing a 2024 Run?
Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockHaley, 51, who served as United Nations ambassador under Trump, is expected to announce her bid on Wednesday, then visit New Hampshire and Iowa. She has called for “generational change” in the party, after three disappointing elections in a row in the Trump era. But in early surveys of the potential Republican field, she is polling in single digits. More
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Will Trump and Biden Gang Up on DeSantis?
If President Biden sometimes sounded a lot like Donald Trump during his State of the Union address, boasting about a record of economic nationalism, the imitation may soon run the other way. Biden’s attacks on congressional Republicans for being allegedly eager to cut Medicare and Social Security were a clear preview of how he hopes to run against the G.O.P. in 2024. But they were also a possible preview of how Trump may try to reclaim his own party’s nomination — by reprising his 2016 campaign’s rejection of Tea Party austerity and attacking potential rivals (which means, primarily, Ron DeSantis) as libertarian dogmatists who don’t care about the middle class.That strategy was previewed a bit recently by Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Shelby Talcott in Semafor. Their subject was the so-called Fair Tax, a longstanding fascination for certain right-wing activists that proposes to replace the U.S. tax code with a sales tax. This would yield certain advantages in economic efficiency; it would also result in a dramatic tax increase on the middle class.In the heyday of the Tea Party, when implausible policy proposals were all the rage, the Fair Tax was endorsed by many of today’s 2024 hopefuls: by Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo and, yes, by DeSantis himself. Which gives Trump a license to accuse all these potential rivals of supporting a middle-class tax hike — and the Semafor writers quote a Trumpworld source basically promising an attack along those lines, to force Trump’s rivals to “answer for what they supported and what they’ve advocated in the past.”That same quote could easily apply to the proposed entitlement changes that many Republicans (again, including DeSantis) embraced in the same era, under the influence of Paul Ryan’s budget blueprints. Those proposals were serious rather than crankish, if ill-timed for a moment when there was more fiscal space than deficit hawks believed. But they were also seriously unpopular, and Trump’s discarding of them was crucial to his success in 2016. And having discarded them then, he’s well positioned to go after DeSantis and others now — in imitation of not only his prior campaign but also, as National Review’s Philip Klein points out, the strategy pursued by Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries, when he sank Rick Perry’s candidacy in part by blasting Perry for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”This means that the non-Trump G.O.P. can expect to spend the looming presidential race facing similar attacks from the Biden White House and the Trump campaign. Making the similarity too obvious could backfire on Trump. But the peril for the G.O.P. is that even if Trump can’t beat DeSantis by harping on his past positions, he will still be reinforcing for swing voters the liberal narrative that (non-Trump) Republicans care only about the rich.In one sense that narrative shouldn’t be too hard for DeSantis to counteract, since his record as governor of Florida is more moderate than libertarian — with increases in teacher pay, support for environmental protection and so on — and it’s not clear that voters care that much about long-ago votes if they aren’t tied to specific policy proposals now.But the question is what exactly DeSantis’s more of-the-moment policy proposals would be, in a fiscal landscape constrained by inflation for the first time in decades. There’s certainly a scenario in which he abjures austerity and embraces pro-family and industrial-policy spending, maybe even finds a few modest tax increases that own the professional-class liberals, and thereby evades the Trump-Biden pincer.But it won’t be easy to pull off. Especially because part of Trump’s strength has always been that he doesn’t need the Republican Party’s donor class in the way that normal politicians do, while DeSantis will need to rally that class if he’s going to dethrone the former president. And the price of their support will be, most likely, something that isn’t particularly popular: not an idea from the fringes like Fair Tax or a big entitlement overhaul proposal, necessarily, but at the very least a budget-eating tax cut that probably won’t be populist in any way.Again, 2012 is an interesting precedent. Part of what killed Romney in that general election was that even though he championed Social Security against Perry and declined to embrace any crankish tax proposals, he still ended up saddled with a tax overhaul plan that donors and activists liked but that was easy for the Democrats to attack.It’s not hard to imagine a DeSantis candidacy that rallies the establishment and defeats Trump only to end up in a similar general-election position. Which suggests one way in which Trump’s populist attacks on other Republicans could actually be helpful to the party’s chances. They’ll leave no doubt, for DeSantis or any other figure, about the political weaknesses of traditional right-wing policymaking. And they might force an early adaptation that otherwise could come, like Romney’s attempted pivots in 2012, as too little and too late.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More
